At first, my dad said to me, his eyes fixed on that part of the highway illuminated by his high beams, the sleet turning to snow in the headlights, I felt relieved. I didn’t want to go home to the house without my mother and face the bizarre denial of my dad and my confused younger brothers around whom I kept trying to act like everything that was happening was normal. But then I started getting — I remember this surprised me — really angry, and I said to the ticket collector with such intensity that he turned and looked at me, as did a couple of the other people around us: I am getting on this train. I think I sounded like a lunatic. I’m afraid that’s not possible, son, the ticket collector said after looking me over, my dad said to me, I said to Alex, and maybe it was the fact that he said it kindly, and that he said “son,” but the next thing I knew, I burst into tears there on the platform. I mean, I really lost it, tears and snot and everything, standing there freezing in my suit, maybe still with smelling salts in my breast pocket, all the repressed emotion, all the emotion I’d been planning to share with Rachel when I’d called her the day our parents died and held in during her father’s funeral, all of it started to surface. And then I said to the conductor: Please, I said, please: my mother is dying. I have to get back. I have to get back in time, please, I kept repeating. My mother is dying. And I felt as if it were true: as if she were dying and not dead, or as if the train could take me back in time.
I drank my drink and Alex drank her water in silence for a minute and I placed my hand on the table so it was touching hers in order to communicate that I was also thinking about her mom. Then my dad was quiet in the car, nothing but the sound of the windshield wipers, as if that were the end of the story, so finally I said: And then? And then, he said, as if it were an afterthought, they let me on the train, one of the decommissioned cars, and an older woman who had overheard my outburst on the platform ended up sitting beside me. And I remember she bought me tea and cookies from the food car and I slept a big part of the ride back on her shoulder. I remember her saying every once in a while: Your mom is going to be just fine.
I finished my drink, accidentally swallowing some mint. “We were going the wrong direction, by the way.”
“What?”
“My dad drove us an hour into Missouri; he was so caught up in the story, he missed the exit for Topeka.”
“Maybe he was driving toward D.C.”
Then, voluble from the alcohol, I told her about Noor and Mrs. Meacham and she told me a story about her mother she made me swear I’d never include in anything, no matter how disguised, no matter how thoroughly I failed to describe faces or changed names.
* * *
A circuitous path leading through several museum buildings allows the visitor to trace the evolution of vertebrates, a walkable cladogram with alcoves on either side of the path displaying fossils of species that shared physical characteristics — e.g., “four limbs with movable joints surrounded by muscle” (tetrapods). I’d paid almost fifty dollars for two tickets to the American Museum of Natural History so that Roberto and I could tour the osseous remains, could track the evolution of new traits, a field trip I’d been promising him for many months and had finally proposed to his mother when I handed him off one afternoon after tutoring; she either forgot about my offer or considered it for several weeks before letting me know through Aaron which Saturdays — Sundays were taken up with church and family — were workable. I’d called her to finalize arrangements: I would meet her and Roberto at the subway stop nearest their apartment, the D on Thirty-sixth in Sunset Park, and he and I would travel together, transferring to the C at West Fourth, to the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. We’d spend several hours at the museum, assuming his attention held, then I’d take him out to lunch, mindful of his allergies, and return him to the family home in the late afternoon. Roberto’s older sister, Jasmine, was initially planning to join us — primarily, I assumed, to make Anita feel more comfortable — but, Anita explained to me when we exchanged holas at the Thirty-sixth Street stop, Jasmine had had to work an unexpected shift at the Applebee’s in Flatbush. Anita seemed a little nervous as she transferred Roberto, tremulous with excitement, to my care.
It was not until we were standing on the platform and Roberto approached its edge to point out two soot-colored rats moving among the garbage on the tracks that I consciously registered the fact that I had never been so responsible for another person, at least not a young person. I’d babysat my nephews when visiting Seattle, but always in their home, never abroad in a crumbling metropolis; I’d carried a passed-out Alex back to her dorm from a party after we’d split a horse tranquilizer in college; I’d taken Jon to the emergency room three times for injuries he’d sustained through drunken athletic idiocy or defending his or Sharon’s honor in brief and clumsy fights, etc.; but none of my peers was a flight risk or a possible kidnapping victim. With a sinking feeling I realized that, if I were Anita, I might well have declined to entrust my child to my care. But then, Aaron had vouched for me: I was a published author.
I told Roberto to step back from the platform as the train approached and as soon as we sat down I showed him the notebooks I’d brought for jotting down our observations — the notebooks had been Alex’s suggestion — and explained our goals for the day in a tone that implied we were embarking on a solemn paleontological mission that would admit of no spontaneity, let alone insubordination. Roberto was particularly excited to see the display of an allosaurus skeleton positioned over an apatosaurus’s corpse as though it were scavenging and he kept leaping up from the seat to mimic the bipedal predator’s posture — he’d seen it on the Internet — and I kept telling him to sit down.
At West Fourth we caught the C and it was crowded. At Fourteenth a crush of new passengers entered the train and bodies imposed themselves between Roberto and me. I wondered if people would have stepped between us if we were racially indistinguishable; I pushed my way back to him and took his hand. This was the first time our bodies had come into willed contact in the many months of our relationship and he looked up at me, maybe with curiosity, maybe reacting to the sweatiness of my palm; we are going to stick together at all times, I said to him, noting the desperation in my own voice. To dispel it I smiled and complimented his red Jurassic Park T-shirt and asked him to remind me what giant sauropods most likely ate. While he enumerated prehistoric flora, I was thinking: holding his hand is the only permissible physical contact; if he were to run away from me, I couldn’t grab or otherwise discipline him; if he reported any form of restraint beyond hand-holding during transit, who knows what would happen; an undocumented family wasn’t going to call the cops, but his dad might run me over in the truck Roberto was always bragging about; they might report Aaron, who had let me enter the school without observing protocol. “You’re not my teacher,” Roberto had said on more than one occasion when I’d tried to force him to focus on our book; I imagined him exclaiming it in the museum and then disappearing into the depths of the bioluminescence exhibit, never to be seen again.